Urban Ecoist

I had originally planned on starting this thread in Early April, but a family thing had me effectively offline all month. So I’ll try to pick up the pieces of my failed planned to keep you all abreast of the developments in my garden and *ahem* plow ahead.

A little background on not only my garden, but also why I have decided to focus on the small garden plots in my yard. I begin with the latter. I do not in any way profess to be an expert gardener, in fact far from it. I am however an eager student and an effective researcher. I am also proving to be a cautionary example of what not to do.

For example, this is what I did to a Spanish lavender bush in my yard.

Yeah, don’t do this at home.

Gardening has become rather fashionable as of late, and in so much that maybe you are starting out in your own garden or starting to think about starting, maybe you can glean some value from reading about my own trials and tribulations in the ol’ victory garden.

Now the former…Perhaps overly ambitious, I began gardening with a bang. I was renting a farm house at the time, and hey, it’s a farm. That first garden became a beast, and ultimately led to a lot of mistakes on my part and on the part of bad luck. My next garden was an easy-to-manage raised bed of 24 square feet. If you take one piece of advice from all of this self-indulgence, start small.

Last year was my first season in Portland, Oregon. I live in a funky yard with a lot of different sun-shade patterns that I clearly did not know before planting. Not only that, but ravenous insects were also a major issue (especially cutworms). I definitely learned a lot from that first year. Also, I should mention that I rent my home (as do many urbanites) , so I am limited in what kind of garden improvements I can make.

That said, I did spend a good part of last season composting for this season. Success in that, and I bought a lot of compost last season and dug it in everywhere I could to try and break up all that effing clay that we have here in Oregon. I was a little underfunded last year, so I couldn’t go crazy with soil testing and the fancier soil amendments. I figured that compost was good as an all-around soil amendment, so I settled on composting as a cheap, effective action I could take for future use.

Also, last year I put in peas — lots of peas. I love peas, and they are seriously the easiest veggie to grow. Not only that, but pea plants fix nitrogen into the soil and if you dig the spent plants into the ground after your harvest, they break down into “green manure.” So, really, if you cannot do anything else this year, put in some peas.

My efforts last year included putting in some herbs. Fresh herbs are so super awesome to have around if you like to cook, or if you just want to impress people (if you are that gardener). I put in sage, chives, flat-leaf parsley, rosemary, and thyme.

Oh, yeah, and I put in twelve strawberry plants. A June-bearing variety (Mount Hood) and an ever-bearing. I read that you shouldn’t let your berry plants produce fruit the first year, which is so hard to do, but I trimmed off all flower heads to prevent fruiting. I am expecting some huge rewards for my herculean test of patience.

And somewhere I read that garlic should go into the ground in the fall, so I put in some garlic bulbs from my kitchen that were starting to grow little crowns. I try to only buy organic garlic, so I hope they were okay to stick in the ground. What’s the worse that can happen, right?

The baby on the right is Carlitos. You can read more about him and other children affected by pesticides here.

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The other day I wrote about the kitchen garden that First Lady Michelle Obama is putting in on the White House grounds, the first garden since the World War II victory garden tended by Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Obama decided to garden after being gently encouraged by a group called Kitchen Gardeners International, and just when you’d think that the First Lady is going to get some respect for doing something like planting some lettuce and peas for White House dinners, another group has taken offense.

The Catch-22 Garden

Seems the organic garden of Mrs. Obama is ruffling some feathers among those that farm the “conventional” way. Ok, is it odd that the way of farming that has been around for thousands of years and lead to the dawn of civilization is not called “conventional”? No, conventional farming is the newfangled less-than-a-century-in-use chemical farming that everyone thought was the answer to all of our species troubles.

Anyway, the Mid America CropLife Association has sent Mrs. Obama a letter asking her to rethink her plans to go organic in her kitchen garden. The main gist of the argument is that chemical “conventional” agricultural practices are good enough for everyone else, so the Obamas don’t need to go starting something.

Here’s a brilliant passage from the letter, which I got from La Vida Locavore.

Starting in the early 1900’s, technology advances have allowed farmers to continually produce more food on less land while using less human labor. Over time, Americans were able to leave the time-consuming demands of farming to pursue new interests and develop new abilities. Today, an average farmer produces enough food to feed 144 Americans who are living longer lives than many of their ancestors. Technology in agriculture has allowed for the development of much of what we know and use in our lives today. If Americans were still required to farm to support their family’s basic food and fiber needs, would the U.S. have been leaders in the advancement of science, communication, education, medicine, transportation and the arts?

We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents. Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents. The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family’s year-round food needs.

Much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown. Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical. Local and conventional farming is not mutually exclusive. However, a Midwest mother whose child loves strawberries, a good source of Vitamin C, appreciates the ability to offer California strawberries in March a few months before the official Mid-west season.

So, chemicals pesticides and fertilizers are responsible for mankind’s advances in other “fields”…ok, sure, I’ll buy that a constant food supply does allow for surpluses, which would in turn lead to wealth that would be able to fund research and the arts. But a lot of studies are showing that there is very little real advantage to conventional farming methods, and that often the health of the soil is degraded over many seasons as the farmers are throwing chemical nutrients into the soil hoping that the plants will absorb them before they leach through the soils into the groundwater supply. If the nutrients are not staying the soil, then the soil turns to dust.

And I love the part at the end about a Midwestern mother be able to give her strawberry-loving child berries in March rather than waiting for the June strawberry season. Come on, that is a poor argument, especially as we start looking at the total carbon footprint of the agricultural industry and see that transporting produce in off-seasons can really add up in terms of carbon emissions. Not only that, but that California strawberry was picked while it was underripe, and underdeveloped nutritionally-speaking, so that it would be perfectly ripe by the time it made its cross-country trip to that Illinois grocery store.

That Midwestern mother would be better off teaching her kid about seasonality and how local produce is more often than not the produce at the peak of its nutritional load. Better yet, she could plant a strawberry patch with her child and then freeze extra berries for March, or make the berries into jam to have all year like my mom did.

Michelle Obama, organic gardening, White House, kitchen garden, agriculture, crops, farming, conventional farming, chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, seasonality, local foods, Kitchen Gardeners International, carbon emissions

Within days of Michelle Obama breaking ground on the White House’s South Lawn, California’s First Lady Maria Shriver announced that she too will be putting in an “edible garden” in Sacramento’s Capitol Park.

Will the updated “victory garden” become the new black…or rather green?

According to the White House blog, First Lady Michelle Obama and a group of students from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, DC got out the shovels and starting digging up the South Lawn. They are putting in a vegetable garden complete with herbs, both perennial and annual. You can click here to see a PDF of the somewhat ambitious garden plans. I love the idea to include edible flowers (nasturiums) and beneficial flowers (marigolds, zinnia) to attract or repel insects. So much better than nasty pesticides.

The official story is that it will be the kids working the “kitchen” garden, and I applaud the fact that the crops planned are the easy

“kid-friendly” peas, lettuces, spinach, and onions. There is some room for broccoli and fennel as well. I’m sure there will be a garden staff to help out in addition to the student labor.

The White House Kitchen Garden, as the blog refers to it, is the first such garden at the White House since World War II and Eleanor Roosevelt. The Clintons had a rooftop garden, but this is the first to go in the actual grounds of the White House in some 60 years.

It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t mention that the WHKG was “suggested” to the Obamas by more than 100,000 petitioners.

More than 100,000 people have lobbied the president online to plant a garden on the White House lawn, according to Kitchen Gardeners International, a coalition of gardeners whose mission is to inspire and teach people to grow their own food. The group’s Eat the View campaign to plant “high-impact gardens in high-profile places” urged the first family to start an edible garden within the first 100 days of the Obama administration. –LA Times

Not to be outdone in green cred, the California First Lady is planning a vegetable garden to be a demonstration garden for the city of Sacramento. Shriver is working with Alice Waters, who is a big advocate for kitchen gardens and local foods and teaching kids to grow things, and her organization, Edible Schoolyard. The plan is to have the garden as a classroom for kids to learn about food and its production.

The White House kitchen garden will provide organic produce for the White House kitchen, appropriately enough. How cool is that? Dignitaries come into town and eat peas from the White House’s personal garden. Take that, Europe. We’re down with veggies here in the US and we even know how to grow them instead of driving our Hummer to the mega-huge-chain grocery store selling GM crops.

The WHKG will also donate to a local food bank, Miriam’s Kitchen. The California Capitol Edible Garden (CCEG) will “probably” be donating to a food bank.

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At first, I was attracted to this article because it was about the inevitable famines the world will suffer, due to climate change and a 50 percent increase in the world’s population. But then reading through, I noted that the US State Department’s Chief Science Advisor, Dr. Nina Fedoroff, made a strong statement about genetically-modified crops.

Like Professor Beddington [Britain’s chief scientist] and Bob Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Dr Fedoroff believes genetic engineering must be expanded if the world is going to be able to feed itself.

Genetic modification, she said, can have strong environmental benefits, such as significant reductions in pesticide use, while improving crop yields. Of crucial important will be the ability of scientists to identify genes which enable plants to survive in hot and dry zones so that they can be used to help the most productive crop strains survive and thrive as global warming intensifies.

She said it was important that both GM technologies and conventional crop development were encouraged now because the process of bringing new strains from the laboratory to the field took years. — TimesOnline

Ah, CM crops. Thay sound like such a great idea, don’t they? Just go in and tinker with a plant until it doesn’t need water to grow or frightens away certain insects. But we have a multitude of examples of science being used to catastrophic ends, and I am of the opinion that genetically-modifying crops is most probably a bad idea.

However, that said, we may not have a choice in the matter, and due to desperation, we may just have to play god and hope that things work out.

The “top US Scientist” as the title of the Times article suggests, is in France for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conference this week. Dr. Fedoroff is there to talk about food shortages and the action needed to prevent them.

Fedoroff is “convinced that food shortages will be the biggest challenge facing the world as temperatures and population levels rise. Food security in the coming years, she said, is ‘a huge problem’ that has been met with little more than complacency. ‘We are asleep at the switch,’ she said.”

It’s funny that she’d advocate for GMO’s over population control. If there will be a shortage of food in 2030 that will affect 1 billion people, and the population at that time would be around 9 billion, why not instead try to promote family-planning and reduce the future population by one billion people? Problem solved.

And yes, I’m being glib.

US, State Department, Nina Fedoroff, famine, food shortage, climate change, population

Ok, so a little insight into me…I like watching cooking competition shows. You know, like Top Chef or Iron Chef. And I really like watching shows that pit restaurant against restaurant, like last year’s Last Restaurant Standing on BBC or this year’s The Chopping Block.

Anyhoo, while watching The Chopping Block last night, there was quite a little to-do over Chilean Sea Bass. The restaurant’s client did not approve of serving Chilean Sea Bass as it is severely over-fished (thanks to a brilliant marketing decision to rename the Patagonian Toothfish). The “chefs”, and I use that term loosely in this case, had already ordered 25 pounds of the Chilean Sea Bass. They quickly tried to get a different fish, halibut, but that did not last the night. When a lady’s order for halibut could not be made, the kitchen suggested the Chilean Sea Bass. The client actually went into the kitchen to express that she did not want Chilean Sea Bass served…at all. Bravo to you, Nicole Miller. But alas, the “kitchen” (now that is loose too) sent out farmed-raised salmon. Another no-no.

And on top of that a few days ago, I found out about a campaign to stop the unregulated swordfish trade. Which makes me cringe as I wrote my very first newspaper-published article back in 1997 about how swordfish were being overfished and responsible chefs were taking off their menus. Sigh.

Which leads me to my topic today. Do you know what fish is safe and responsible to eat?

I know there are some people out there that think that if a restaurant has it on the menu, it must be okay to eat. Wrong. You see, the thing about Chilean sea bass is that is brings in a really good price due to its growing scarcity. Same with tuna. Same with swordfish. And if something brings in enough money, it doesn’t matter if it is harvested in a responsible manner or not. Think of fish as the tar sands of wild foods. It may still make money for people, but at what cost?

And unfortunately, with fish, there are fewer and fewer good choices out there. I’m pretty nerdy about this kind of thing, and yet, I even have a hard time keeping up with what’s ok to eat. I pop by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch website (click here to go) a few times a year to check out their handy guides (paper or mobile) about not only which fish are overfished or unsustainably harvested, but which fish tend to carry heavier burden of ocean pollution (i.e. mercury and other heavy metals) and pass them onto their devourer in a sort of poetic justice.

I know what a a pain it can be to be picky about the species of fish you will and won’t eat. But trust me, all chefs are total whores for your approval. The kitchen may make fun of you for bitching about farm-raised salmon, but not for long. They will know that you are right, and I bet they’ll change that menu as soon as they run out of the product.

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I ran across an excellent article today on AlterNet (alternet.org). Usually, I am not one to simply phone it in and copy and paste an article onto this site, and I won’t do that, but I will paraphrase the article a bit and urge you to click here to go to the source article.

The writer, Andrea Whitfill, is a kindred spirit in that she also reads lots of labels to see whence our consumer products come (wow, not often I get to correctly use whence in a sentence). This annoying habit has plagued me for years. So much so, that my boyfriend won’t buy toilet tissue without checking with me about the producer and whether “we” support them or not.

However, sometimes there are no good choices.

Ms. Whitfill decided to look beyond the labels, as many a label is downright misleading, to see who was really behind some of those “crunchy” eco-sustainable-green brands that we (suckers) have come to love and support religiously (but in an atheistic way). And for many of us that think of ourselves as Earth-lovers, we may not want to met the “man behind the curtain.”

In summary, so as to encourage you to read the source, almost every company that you like to think of as “small” or “family-owned” or “natural and organic” is in reality a small subsidiary of a much, much larger corporation.

Clorox owns the Burt’s Bees brand. Tom’s of Maine is owned by Colgate-Palmolive. Coca-Cola bought Odwalla (also HonesTea) and Pepsi owns Naked. And there’s more in the article, and in the graphic below. Click here to see larger version.

The only upside to Big Corporations owning those specialty brands is that yes, those brands can now reach a bigger stage in the major grocery chains, so maybe more people will make the choice to go organic or natural (if those brands are still organic and natural — I have a hard time trusting that a major corporation wouldn’t tweak a “natural” brand to cut costs).

And maybe I am too much of a Pollyanna here, but maybe the parent corporations will learn something from their granola-lovin’ stepchildren…eh, probably not.

AlterNet, organic food, sustainable agriculture, food processors, natural food, health food brands, Clorox, Burt’s Bees, Tom’s of Maine, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-Cola, Odwalla, HonesTea, Pepsi, Naked juices, major corporations